One source says: “She’s been told – ‘You need to understand prime minister, it’s very simple maths – the ERG [European Research Group] will fuck you, fuck the Conservative party and they will throw themselves over a cliff. Your Remainer colleagues will not’. It’s who’s got the biggest balls.”

“The Remainers need a gameplan to show Julian [Smith] is wrong on this. At the moment, they are rolling over having tummies tickled. And she’s thrown all her weight behind the chief whip.

“She gets to save her party and potentially gets to live for another day. She will be the PM who delivered Brexit. She can blame Parliament and Tusk, Juncker and the EU [for no-deal] and say I managed it as best as anyone could.

“She’s home and dry as long as she sits tight with the Brexiteers who only a few weeks ago wanted her head. It’s utterly tragic.”

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“A lot of people are in despair. The sensible ones have their head in their hands, the nutters we kept at the door for 40 odd years are now in control. We thought they were dead after they didn’t get rid of her. They are back in control, because they are willing to blow the house up.”

No developed country trades purely on “WTO rules”. The idea that Britain should be the first to give it a go has gained currency in the Conservative party from sheer embarrassment. It is not a model for post-Brexit trade, it is a euphemism for failure to understand the true value of EU membership. It conveys a deep unwillingness to admit any kind of dependency on our European neighbours, even the mutually beneficial dependency of the single market – the largest, most sophisticated free-trade zone in the world, conceived and driven in large part as a British initiative, by Conservative governments.

This is the sad island where a generation of Tories find themselves intellectually discredited and marooned. They wanted to unchain Britannia and they ended up uncoupled from their own history, unmoored from basic geography, and adrift from economic reality.

"This is the great and final victory of Ukip. They have taken their economically catastrophic EU agenda, their bizarre sense of thin-skinned personal victimhood, and their culture-war poison over immigration and embedded it in the guts of the Tory party."